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Hayden B. Peake

“Counterintelligence” (CI) is a term with multiple meanings—its definitions vary, even when applied to a single nation. Yet it can be understood by identifying the common CI functions in a ...
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“Counterintelligence” (CI) is a term with multiple meanings—its definitions vary, even when applied to a single nation. Yet it can be understood by identifying the common CI functions in a source. These include: handling double agents, defectors, deception operations, and covert communications; handling and detecting moles or penetrations; and dealing with security threats in general. Antecedent elements of what is today called counterintelligence may be found in various histories of intelligence and warfare. The existence of security services can be traced back to ancient Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, China, and Muscovy, among others. With the rise of the nation-state, rulers began creating secret political police organizations to safeguard their existence. In the case of the United States, it was not until the Civil War that there was anything like a domestic counterintelligence agency, and even then it was not a statutory organization. After World War I, however, former intelligence officers, agents, defectors, and journalists began publishing accounts of counterintelligence and domestic security operations. These topics were often discussed side-by-side. The number of scholarship on CI grew as World War II and the Cold War followed. In particular, the so-called “Cambridge Five” case—which involved five Cambridge graduates who were recruited as Soviet spies in the 1930s—had generated considerable literature and was furthermore considered an important case study in Western and Soviet intelligence services.

Jennifer D. Kibbe

Covert action presents a potential policy for decision makers who want something quicker or more muscular than diplomacy but less expensive and obtrusive than military force. In contrast ...
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Covert action presents a potential policy for decision makers who want something quicker or more muscular than diplomacy but less expensive and obtrusive than military force. In contrast with intelligence, which entails collecting and analyzing information, covert action is an active instrument of foreign policy. The three main categories of covert action include propaganda, political action, and paramilitary action. Another separate category is economic action, which involves destabilizing the target state’s economy in some way. Because of the inherent secrecy of covert action, outside scholars have no way of knowing how much they do or do not know about the topic at hand and it also makes it hard to verify the information, since the information comes from a variety of sources. Covert action literature is particularly strong in case studies of particular operations. There is also a well-developed subsection within the field that focuses on covert action since the end of the Cold War, the role that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) played during World War II, and covert actions undertaken by other states. However, there are several issues in the covert action literature. These issues include the assessment of the success or failure of particular operations and of the policy instrument as a whole, the tangible and intangible costs incurred by covert action, the ethical questions raised by conducting covert actions as well as the particular methods used and its impact on democracy, the oversight of covert action, and the evolution of US law covering covert action.

K.M. Fierke

Critical theory in International Relations originated from the Marxist tradition which, during the mid- to late Cold War, formed the basis of dependency and world systems theory. In the ...
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Critical theory in International Relations originated from the Marxist tradition which, during the mid- to late Cold War, formed the basis of dependency and world systems theory. In the years before and after the Cold War, critical theory became part of a larger post-positivist challenge to the discipline and to the development of critical security studies. At the heart of contestation within the broader arena of critical security is the concept of emancipation, developed by members of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Several key debates have been at the center of critical security studies relating to the construction of threats, identity and difference, human security, and emancipation. In particular, critical security analysts have addressed the question of how, given the range of threats or risks that exist in the world, some threats come to have priority over others and become the focus of discourses of security. Also, some scholars have disputed the idea that identity is dependent on difference. The concept of human security shifts attention away from states to individuals, emphasizing human rights, safety from violence, and sustainable development. In the case of emancipation, critical theorists have expressed concern that the concept is too closely linked with modernity, meta-narratives, especially Marxism and liberalism, and the Enlightenment belief that humanity is progressing toward a more perfect future. What is needed is not to avoid emancipation per se, but to pay close attention to its underlying assumptions.

Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen

International security studies (ISS) has significantly evolved from its founding core of “golden age” strategic studies. From the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s through to the ...
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International security studies (ISS) has significantly evolved from its founding core of “golden age” strategic studies. From the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s through to the 1970s, strategic studies virtually was ISS, and remains a very large part of it. The fact that it continues to stand as the “mainstream” attacked by widening/deepening approaches further speaks to its status as a “core.” This core consists of those literatures whose principal concern is external military threats to the state, and the whole agenda of the use of force which arises from that. This core was originally focused on nuclear weapons and the military-political rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union, but has since adapted its focus to changes in the salience and nature of military threats caused by the end of the Cold War and 9/11. It includes literatures on deterrence, arms racing, arms control and disarmament, grand strategy, wars (and “new wars”), the use of force, nuclear proliferation, military technology, and terrorism. Debates within ISS are structured, either implicitly or explicitly, by five questions: (1) which referent object to adopt, (2) whether to understand security as internally or externally driven, (3) whether to limit it to the military sector or to expand it, (4) what fundamental thinking about (international) politics to adopt, and (5) which epistemology and methodology to choose.

John D. Stempel

There is a potentially serious difference between diplomacy and intelligence. Creative tension between diplomacy and intelligence stems from the involvement of both with questions of ...
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There is a potentially serious difference between diplomacy and intelligence. Creative tension between diplomacy and intelligence stems from the involvement of both with questions of strategy and statecraft. Indeed, the source of this conflict is often clandestine or covert activities that become public and adversely affect both relations between states and diplomats’ ongoing work. Early works in the intelligence scholarship focuses basically at the descriptive level and centers on acquiring information. In 1922, studies began considering the political aspects of the intelligence–diplomacy connection, zeroing in on the defects of US intelligence and the adequacy of policies, including those related to intelligence gathering and its impact on diplomacy. Studies about the details of the intelligence–diplomacy connection also began to appear. These studies look at the interplay between intelligence and policy making as well as the morality of clandestine operations. In order to link intelligence goals to policy needs, future studies on the intelligence–diplomacy connection should further assess the impact of culture on intelligence gathering and perception, provide better insight into the characteristics of good versus bad intelligence officers and diplomats, include qualitative estimates of the effectiveness and efficacy of techniques and strategies as well as legal and ethical discussions of control and policy, and explore the strategic interactions between intelligence officers and diplomats and how these are managed in various governing systems.

David M. Rowe

Economic sanctions are a versatile instrument of statecraft used by states to try to influence the behavior of foreign actors by threatening or restricting customary cross-border trade or ...
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Economic sanctions are a versatile instrument of statecraft used by states to try to influence the behavior of foreign actors by threatening or restricting customary cross-border trade or financial flows to an intended target. Examples of economic sanctions are retaliatory tariffs imposed in trade disputes and the complete cessation of economic flows aimed at undermining a certain regime. The importance of economic sanctions to policy makers has spawned a substantial amount of scholarly work dominated by two questions: whether sanctions “work” and whether states should use them. The long-running scholarly debate about whether sanctions work is essentially a dispute over how to classify cases. However, comparing cases of success and failure is problematic, in part because the very notion of what constitutes the successful use of sanctions is not clear and policy makers rarely seek to influence a single target or pursue a single policy goal when using sanctions. One of the most promising developments in the literature has been the increasing use of game theory to analyze sanctions, but this approach does not adequately determine the appropriateness of sanctions as a policy instrument. Sanctions research should focus instead on the basic strategic dynamics of the sanctions episode in order to identify those factors that contribute most strongly to the effective use of sanctions and to enable policy makers to understand more about the consequences of using sanctions as an instrument of statecraft.

Tarak Barkawi

International relations (IR) and security studies lack a coherent and developed body of inquiry on the issue of empire. The central focus of IR situates discussion of imperialism and ...
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International relations (IR) and security studies lack a coherent and developed body of inquiry on the issue of empire. The central focus of IR situates discussion of imperialism and hierarchy outside the core of the discipline, and on its fringes where scholars from other disciplines engage with IR and security studies literature. Similarly, security studies focus on major war between great powers, not “small wars” between the strong and the weak. The general neglect of empire and imperialism in IR and security studies can be attributed to Eurocentrism, of the unreflective assumption of the centrality of Europe and latterly the West in human affairs. In IR this often involves placing the great powers at the center of analysis, as the primary agents in determining the fate of peoples. Too easily occluded here are the myriad international relations of co-constitution, which together shape societies and polities in both the global North and South. In 1986, Michael Doyle published Empires, a thoughtful effort to systematize the historiography of empire and imperialism with social science concepts. It is rarely cited, much less discussed, in disciplinary literature. By contrast, the pair of articles he published in 1983 on Kant and the connection between liberalism and peace revived the democratic peace research program, which became a key pillar of the liberal challenge to realism in the 1990s and is widely debated. The reception of Doyle’s work is indicative of how imperialism can be present but really absent in IR and security studies.

John S. Duffield

A substantial amount of scholarly literature about the relationship between energy and security, and how it has changed over time, has been produced before the early 1970s through the ...
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A substantial amount of scholarly literature about the relationship between energy and security, and how it has changed over time, has been produced before the early 1970s through the 2000s. Relatively few scholarly works were written on energy and security prior to the 1970s, and few scholars paid attention to the growing dependence of the United States and its allies on oil, whether imported or not, and its potential political, economic, and security ramifications. During the 1970s, two major oil shocks prompted two overlapping waves of scholarship on energy and security. The first oil shock began in 1973, when the Arab members of OPEC cut back production and embargoed exports to the United States and several other countries that were deemed too sympathetic to Israel during the October War. A closely related theme was Western cooperation on energy security. In the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a notable decline in the amount of scholarship published on the theme of energy and security, probably due to an overall improvement in the oil security situation. The 2000s witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between energy and security owing to a variety of factors, such as the run up in oil prices that occurred in 1999 and 2000, and the reemergence of resource nationalism. Despite the significant volume of scholarship on energy and security, it could be argued that the important relationship between them has yet to be fully explored and deserves more research.

Özgür Özdamar

Next to national defense, energy security has become a primary issue for the survival and wellbeing of both developed and developing nations. A review of the literature shows how concerns ...
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Next to national defense, energy security has become a primary issue for the survival and wellbeing of both developed and developing nations. A review of the literature shows how concerns for energy security acquired a new dimension after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the Western powers and a weakened Russia competed for the control of the Eurasia region and its energy resources. Research has also focused on how different countries have developed a variety of strategies for securing their energy supply. Energy security literature can be split into three general sections: neoclassical economics and public choice, bureaucratic politics and public administration, and political economy. Scholars have also explored regime theory, resource conflict, and the relationship between national energy security and foreign policy. In the case of the United States, four major challenges in foreign policy issues related to energy security can be identified: “building alliances, strengthening collective energy security, asserting its interests with energy suppliers, and addressing the rise of state control in energy.” These challenges require eight specific foreign policy responses from the U.S. government, two of which constitute the core relationship between energy security and foreign policy making: “candor and respect” for the producer countries, and foreign policies that promote the stability and security of suppliers.

Elizabeth L. Chalecki

The term environment is often used as a short form for the biophysical environment, which refers to the biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently ...
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The term environment is often used as a short form for the biophysical environment, which refers to the biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. All life that has survived must have adapted to conditions of its environment. On one hand, part of the study of environmental science is the investigation of the effect of human activity on the environment. On the other hand, scholars also examine threats posed by environmental events and trends to individuals, communities, or nations, otherwise known as environmental security. It studies the impact of human conflict and international relations on the environment, or on how environmental problems cross state borders. Environmental security is a significant concept in two fields: international relations and international development. Within international development, projects may aim to improve aspects of environmental security such as food security or water security, along with connected aspects such as energy security. The importance of environmental security lies in the fact that it affects humankind and its institutions anywhere and at anytime. To the extent that humankind neglects to maintain the planet’s life-supporting eco-systems generating water, food, medicine, and clean air, current and future generations will be confronted with increasingly severe instances of environmentally induced changes.